


Unfamiliar Skies

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: His Dark Materials (TV)
Genre: Balloon Sex, Consensual Daemon Touching, Hand Jobs, Lee's First Time With a Dude, Light Angst, Lin-Manuel Miranda seems like the kind of person who reads his own fanfic, M/M, Male Bonding, and then it turned into 20 pages of men having feelings before anyone even takes their pants off, because i'm a fucking Virgo, big fan, btw they don't die i refuse to allow it, hashtag my brand, hey buddy, i totally thought this was just going to be a quickie, so if he does, so naturally i went back in and cut seven words out, to make it an even number, when i posted this it turned out to be 10007 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:13:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28625523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: Lee Scoresby and the shaman Jopari get to know each other a little better during a long night flight.. . . or, Alexander Hamilton and the priest from "Fleabag" walk into a balloon, and I suddenly discover a totally unexpected new Hot Dad ship.(Takes place during s2e6, "Malice," though obviously with some creative license. Also riffs on that great Scoresby/Coulter scene, which inspired some headcanons about Lee's past and childhood which are alluded to here. Also full of my own headcanons about how sexytimes work when daemons are involved. I haven't read the books in like 15 years so don't yell at me if I missed something, this is very much Show Fic and not Book Fic.)
Relationships: John Parry/Lee Scoresby
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67
Collections: John Parry and Lee Scoresby





	Unfamiliar Skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kataurah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kataurah/gifts).



> _"Galileo's head was on the block_  
>  _The crime was looking up for truth_  
>  _And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode_  
>  _I try to trace them to my youth_
> 
> _Then you had to bring up reincarnation_  
>  _Over a couple of beers the other night_  
>  _And now I'm serving time for mistakes_  
>  _Made by another in another life_
> 
> _How long 'til my soul gets it right_  
>  _Can any human being ever reach that kind of light_  
>  _I call on the resting soul of Galileo_  
>  _King of night vision, king of insight"_
> 
> \--Indigo Girls, "Galileo"

Lee was not sure what he had expected, but the new world simply looked like . . . well, the old world. Vast craggy mountains, sprawling glossy seas. A new landscape, but not an alien one. The trees below were the color of ordinary trees, and the sky the color of ordinary sky . . . though he was forced to concede the remarkable brilliance of the sunset, streaking the heavens above and around them with peach and gold and scarlet, flung any old way like a careless painter shaking off his giant brush.

“You look disappointed,” said the shaman. Though how he could know this was unclear, since he was currently sitting with his head bowed and his hood drawn up, toying with a feather but not looking up, a dark triangle of cryptic silence in the corner of the basket of the balloon - lacking even the presence of a daemon to make him seem human, since Sayan Kötör had been aloft since they crossed through the rift.

“Not disappointed,” Lee clarified, a little needled by the uncomfortable accuracy of the shaman’s remark. “Just remarking on how much worlds are alike, is all.” He leaned over the side of the balloon’s cabin, studying the landscape below. “Makes you wonder what order they came in,” he remarked, to no one in particular. “I ain’t much of one for theology, but I can see why the Magisterium wanted to hush up Asriel Belacqua so badly. Kinda hard to swallow the notion of one perfect universe under one unquestioned Authority if it turns out our world is his hundredth try or something.”

This mental picture earned a quiet chuckle from Hester, who was curled up on the sheepskin covering of the bench beside him. “The first draft world might be real interesting,” she said. “I’d like to see what a tree looks like.”

“I’d like to see what a _man_ looks like,” quipped Lee.

“Two heads, maybe,” the hare suggested.

“Or half of one. Just one eye and a nose split down the middle, and half a chin.”

“Oh, I don’t like that.”

“Wonder how many tries it took,” said Lee, reaching down to give her a scratch between the ears. “Churning out enough worlds to finally hit the jackpot and produce a fella as handsome as me.”

Hester wrinkled her nose at him. “Probably a lot,” she said doubtfully. “Don’t be getting too big for your britches, Lee.”

 _“How long ‘til my soul gets it right,”_ murmured the shaman, in a curious tone that made the words not really a question. 

Lee turned away from the view and looked over at him. “What’s that now?”

“Nothing. An old song.”

“Ah.” Lee nodded at this, understanding. “Shaman magic, is it? Sometimes the spells involve chanting or singing, I’ve heard.”

Jopari seemed to find this very amusing. He set the feather down and pulled back his hood, finally, and looked at Lee with something warm and human in his eyes, suddenly an ordinary person again instead of a magic-touched being who could summon wind with the power of his thoughts.

“Not shaman magic,” he said, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Just the ordinary human sort. The magic of memory. The way music can transport us to another place and time. The power of a good story. It’s a song from my world. About a great scientist named Galileo. You wouldn’t know him, I searched in the libraries of the Scholars but he never existed here. A great pity, I think you’d have liked him. Many centuries ago, he was arrested by my world’s equivalent of the Magisterium, who were threatened by his discoveries.”

“Gee,” said the aeronaut dryly, looking back over his shoulder toward the ever-fainter thread of light in the darkening sky, marking the rift through which they had traveled. “Can’t imagine what could have _possibly_ called that memory to mind just now.” The shaman chuckled at this, eyes following Lee’s back toward the rift, and they watched in silence for a few moments as the wind carried them further and further away into the evening sky.

“You know,” said Lee finally, turning back to the shaman and taking a seat on the bench across from him, reaching down to stroke Hester, “of all the similarities between your world and mine, that’s about one of the most unpleasant.”

Jopari grinned at him. “There are nicer ones,” he said. “We also have a Texas.” This startled both aeronaut and hare into looking up at him, eyes wide with astonishment. The shaman regarded them both with curiosity. “Does that comfort you or distress you?”

But this was, of course, an impossible question. Lee was no Scholar - barely read books, if he could help it - and the thought of another world’s version of Texas opened so many doors inside his mind that he felt himself spinning. Did this other Texas have another Lee Scoresby? If they found a second rift in the sky, and flew through it, and found themselves there, would he recognize it? Would it feel like home? Or would it feel like a shirt with a too-tight collar, almost right but not quite, leaving him itchy and uncomfortable and off-balance?

Was that how it had felt for John Parry, stepping through a hole in the sky in the frozen North and finding himself in a world where half his soul was a female osprey who could speak to him?

If they kept flying, past the city where this Bearer supposedly lived, would they find a Texas here too?

“I don’t know,” was all he finally said.

“What’s it like?” asked Hester drowsily, lifting her head from her position curled up on the threadbare sheepskin of the pilot’s seat. “Your Texas.”

Both men regarded her with curiosity. It was not unheard of for Hester to directly address another person, but it was rare, and it made Lee like the shaman better that he seemed to take the weight of it seriously. That he took _Hester_ seriously. Not everyone always did.

“I wish I could tell you I’ve been there myself,” he said. “So I could describe it to you through my own eyes, instead of through the eyes of others. I’ve seen photographs. Film and television. Moving pictures,” he explained to Hester, before she could ask. “From what I recall, it has a few quite large cities and many small towns, but much of the land is still wide open space. Blue skies. Cattle ranches. Hot, dry summers. Very spicy food. Very good music. Quite a colorful history, I think. I wish I could tell you more.”

Hester, however, was entirely satisfied by this. “Sounds like our Texas,” the hare said happily, curling back up onto the sheepskin again.

“That it does,” said Lee, a peculiar tightness blossoming in his chest, the quiet pain he recognized as homesickness for a past he could never return to. “That it does.”

“May I ask _you_ a question, Hester?” the shaman asked politely, a situation which was frankly even more unprecedented than the other way round, and startled the hare into looking back up at him again. Lee reached out to stroke the fur of her back, anchoring her with the comfort of his presence, uneasy at this turn of events but not quite willing, just yet, to intervene until he heard what the shaman had to say.

“No one besides Lee’s ever asked me anything before,” she said, a little uncertainly. “I guess you can. If you want to.”

“Do you know,” the shaman asked, “ _why_ you are a hare?”

Both Lee and Hester stared at him blankly.

“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” said the hare nervously, looking up at Lee for reassurance, nose twitching slightly. “I just am what I am.”

“Why would you ask a thing like that?” Lee demanded, puzzled and a little defensive.

“Sayan Kötör was already settled, when I arrived here,” Jopari explained. “Our relationship is not like yours. I did not grow up, as you do, with a daemon who changed shape before her final form emerged. I studied daemon magic, from both Scholars and shamans, to attempt to understand her better. How could it be that she was a missing piece of myself? A piece I had lived without, all my life? I learned much about the dual nature of humankind in your world - that we are all male and female, man and beast, souls split in half which manifest in the form of two beings which are distinct, yet connected. The daemon’s settled form reflects some deep, central aspect of the human’s most innate self. That is, Hester is Hester, a being in her own right, but Hester is also a reflection of you. And as I find myself trying very hard to make out a bit more about you, Mr. Scoresby, I run into a continual contradiction I find I cannot resolve. I summoned you, and then I found you were not at all what I expected.”

There was something in his tone that grated on Lee’s nerves, and caused him to bristle a little.

“Yeah?” he shot back. “What’d you expect, then?”

“That flight,” said the shaman, “would be native to you.”

Lee folded his arms and leaned back against the bench, shooting a pointed glare at the shaman. “And just what the hell’s _that_ supposed to mean?” he demanded. “You criticizing my piloting skills?”

“Not in the least,” said Jopari. “This has nothing to do with that. I’m talking of something much deeper, Mr. Scoresby. You live your life up here, among the clouds,” he said, gesturing expansively to take in the sweeping gray-blue sky, the final traces of sunlight rapidly fading beyond the horizon at the edge of the sea. “If you were born with the soul of an aeronaut, if this was always the central core of who you are . . . well, perhaps you would have a Sayan Kötör of your own, instead of Hester.” He leaned forward to regard the hare thoughtfully, with intense, dark eyes. “But you,” he said quietly. “You are not a creature of the skies, are you, Hester? You are a creature of the fields and prairies. You are not what drives Lee Scoresby to the heavens. You are the thing which keeps him grounded. Whatever peculiar configuration of the human soul shapes our daemons shaped you not as a creature of flight, but as a hare, and that makes me wonder if, perhaps, Mr. Scoresby is more than what he seems.”

The hare, plainly, had no idea how to answer this. “I’m not a Scholar’s daemon, Mr. Jopari,” she said. “I don’t know things like they teach you at Oxford, from great big books. I don’t know anything more than that I just wasn’t a hare one day, and the next day I was, and that’s the end of it.”

Lee, indignant on Hester’s behalf, and a little offended (though he wasn’t quite sure why), cut in before Hester felt pressed into saying anything more. “It ain’t like picking the name of an animal off a list,” he explained, a little crossly. “I didn’t go to a daemon store and place an order for a rabbit. Daemons just become who they’re meant to be.”

 _“Exactly,”_ said the shaman. “That is _exactly_ my point, Mr. Scoresby.”

“What is?”

“That you are, by nature, more hare than hawk.”

“I don’t know what the hell that means.”

“Rabbits stay close to home all their lives,” said the shaman. “They rarely travel far, unless circumstance forces it. They care for their young. They . . . copulate . . . with such vigor and frequency that, at least in my world, there is a rather vulgar colloquial saying, which I won’t repeat to offend Hester -”

“Yeah,” said Lee shortly, “we have that saying here too.”

“Home. Land. Family. Sex. Children. _Roots,”_ explained the shaman. “Ties that bind you. To people, to places, to things.”

“Mr. Jopari, I still don’t see -”

“And yet you are a man without land beneath his feet,” the shaman interrupted him. “A man with roots in no particular place. A man who sails through the skies wherever adventure leads him. But I think, Mr. Scoresby, that this is not your innate nature. It was a _choice._ This is what makes you interesting to me.” He leaned forward and met the other man’s eyes, and Lee found himself suddenly, rather uncomfortably, unable to tear his gaze away. The shaman’s handsome, weathered face was heavy with sadness, and the ancient wisdom which sometimes flashed out of his dark eyes and turned him into a distant, unrecognizable creature was long gone, replaced by something urgent and intense and human. 

“What were you running from, Lee Scoresby?” the shaman murmured. “When you should be back in Texas, with your feet on the soil where you were born?”

“I could ask the same of you,” said Lee, discomfited in ways he couldn’t quite explain. Hester, too, seemed uncomfortable, and Lee could feel her tension ease as he finally forced himself to pull away, breaking Jopari’s gaze, and rose from his seat to make his way to the other side of the cabin, digging through the metal box of rations - latched shut, to keep their provisions safe from predators and weather - to scrounge up some dried meat and bread for dinner.

Everything felt slightly calmer once the other man was behind him, his disconcertingly intense dark eyes no longer visible. Lee had expected the shaman to press further, but he seemed content, at least for the moment, to let the matter drop

Still, as Lee poured water from the skin into two tin cups and let the dried meat soften in the hot water pot until it was pliable enough to eat without cracking a tooth, he found himself turning the shaman’s words over and over again in his mind.

John Parry was an explorer - had been even in his other world, his first life, before he’d even had a daemon. When he arrived here and met Sayan Kötör, she had already settled. An osprey. A hunting bird. She could fly further away from him, too, than other daemons; it seemed to work a bit like witch magic, though they could not be parted quite so entirely for long. But his daemon suited him, even though they had never been given the opportunity to grow up together, to bond the way ordinary humans did. A hawk who could fly far, far away from her human, so far away he could no longer even see her shape in the sky, and yet the tether would not break.

_Rabbits stay close to home all their lives._

_What were you running from, Lee Scoresby?_

He shook himself lightly, casting off the weight of memories, and turned to hand the man a cup of water and a plate of bread and stewed meat. 

“Eat,” he said shortly, in a tone designed to discourage mealtime chitchat, and the shaman - who seemed perfectly attuned to Lee’s every expression and tone, and did not need to be told anything twice - ate his meal wordlessly, said nothing but “thank you,” then leaned back against the wall of the cabin, and was silent.

* * * * *

Time passed. Lee was not sure if the other man slept, but he’d shut up, finally, so he didn’t care. The last traces of daylight were long gone, so Lee lit the lanterns, casting a dim amber glow over the smooth wood and leather of the cabin’s interior. It was a warm night, the sky a cloudless black canopy of infinite stars.

The stars seemed to make Hester uneasy. Lee caught her looking up at them from time to time, nose twitching. Finally he knelt down to meet her gaze, where she still rested curled up on the seat. 

“I don’t recognize any of them,” she whispered anxiously. “They’re not our stars, Lee. How do we know where we’re going if even the stars are different?”

“The shaman told us to stay with the wind,” said Lee, with more confidence than he felt. “He says he can get us to the city, and I believe him. Not sure why, but I do.”

“Thank you,” said the shaman, who was, in fact, awake, and had heard this despite Lee’s attempts to pitch his voice low enough that at least the words would not be audible.

Sayan Kötör sailed in gracefully just then, back from a long, exhilarating few hours of swooping and circling through the night sky around them, and perched above the shaman’s shoulder. “If he tells you to trust the wind,” she said crisply, “trust the wind.” 

Then she gave Hester a pointed look, and flew up to the top of the ropes to perch there, ignoring them all once more.

“All right, then,” said Lee. “Guess we trust the wind.”

But he could still feel the shaman watching him, an itch on the back of his neck he couldn’t shake.

Then, “I’m thinking about my wife and my son,” said the shaman unexpectedly, and Lee looked over at him. He was not looking at Lee, not really, and his eyes were unfocused, but he seemed to be trying to say something important. Something real. Almost against his will, Lee found himself drawn to the seat on the bench by his side. But he stayed silent, letting the shaman find the words on his own.

“I feel closer to him, here,” Jopari went on, voice low and vibrating with emotion. “I haven’t been back to this world since I left my own. I hadn’t even met Sayan Kötör. You don’t see your daemon, in my world. I’d given up hope of finding a window and getting back to them.”

There was something raw, almost naked in his voice, and when he looked up suddenly and met Lee’s gaze, there it was again . . . that peculiar intensity that seemed to hold you there, crystallized in amber, unable to pull away, like the force of his emotion was drawing you in. But this time the shaman seemed to feel it too, like an anbaric current running between them, sizzling and crackling with unexpected heat.

Strangely, it was the shaman who looked away first. “Anyway, you were right,” he muttered. “I should sleep. If only I could.”

“Tell you what,” said Lee, surprising himself even more than the shaman. “Why don’t we make some coffee instead.”

“Thank you,” said the other man quietly, as Lee tore himself once again from that magnetic gaze and made his way across the cabin to the dented tin coffee press. He struggled for a few moments with the stubborn lighter before the shaman’s voice echoed behind him again. “Let me help.”

“Yeah,” said Lee wryly, “can you magic us up some fire?”

“One moment,” said the shaman somberly, rising to his feet, startling Lee into turning and looking up at him, watching in something like awe to see what he would do. Would fire swoop down from the skies, the way the wind had? Would the coffee press alight magically, on its own?

When he instead simply pulled a box of matches out of his coat and tossed it to Lee, the aeronaut found himself half embarrassed at his own credulity, half irritated enough to briefly consider pushing the shaman over the side of the balloon.

_Smug son of a bitch._

But when he turned his back again, busying himself with the coffee pot, he could not quite stop himself from smiling.

* * * * *

Whatever Lee’s other failures in life, the one thing he could do was make a hell of a cup of coffee, and it gratified him more than he might have cared to admit to watch Jopari take his first sip and close his eyes, sighing with pleasure at the rich, bitter flavor. The smell of coffee always relaxed Lee, and it seemed it had the same effect on the shaman. They sat quietly side by side for a long moment, sipping from their tin mugs, looking out at the stars, before the shaman finally spoke.

“The girl Lyra,” he said, seemingly out of nowhere. “That was why I asked.”

Lee stiffened. “What do you mean by that, exactly?” he asked. “What about Lyra?”

“I have lived my whole life with my feet on the ground,” said Jopari. “But my daemon is a hunting bird. And I left my son behind me.”

“Don’t see what any of those things have to do with each other,” said Lee. “Or with me and Hester, for that matter.”

“You live your whole life roaming from place to place,” the shaman went on. “Yet this child - who you cannot have known for a great length of time - you love her so deeply you would sacrifice your life for her own.”

“So?”

“And your daemon is a hare,” said Jopari, as though this explained everything. “This is what I meant. About choices, and true nature.”

“You’re still talkin’ all manner of nonsense, shaman,” Lee retorted irritably, but the man seemed unperturbed.

“It isn’t nonsense,” he said mildly. “You are a man looking for a family. You found it in this girl. She drew out something that was buried in you, before. Something you were fleeing. That was all I meant.”

Lee looked out over the low wall of the cabin, into the night sky. The mountains below were just shadows, now, only a faintly blacker black than the empty air surrounding them. “She has a father,” he said. “And it ain’t me.”

“Wouldn’t you be, though?” the shaman pressed him gently. “If you could have any life you wanted? If you could keep her safe, and take her with you?” Lee didn’t answer. “After all of this is over,” said the shaman, in a curiously intense voice, “and the mission has been completed, a very different world might be possible. For all of us.”

“You sure put a lot of faith in a magic knife, Mr. Jopari.”

“You haven’t answered the question, Mr. Scoresby.”

“What question?”

“The question of what kind of life you want.”

Lee turned to look at him again, ready with a dismissive quip on his tongue; but something stopped him. The man looking at him, asking him puzzling and complicated questions about roots - about choices - about fathers and children - was not the cryptic shaman or even the adventuring Scholar. It was John Parry. It was the man who had left his own son behind.

This was personal for him.

Fate had pulled him away from his own boy, the way fate had pulled Lee toward Lyra, and both of them had been powerless to resist it, and suddenly all this talk of hawks and hares made a little bit more sense.

John Parry was asking, in his way, whether leaving his son behind was something that was fundamentally in his nature, or whether it was a choice.

Lee felt a wave of empathy wash over him for the first time. It made the other man seem more relatable, suddenly; gaining the power to control the weather - or send his daemon away from him, or summon an aeronaut with a ring, or embark upon a quest to find a magic knife for Asriel - had not assuaged every single one of his ordinary human doubts.

He was not omniscient, in other words. He was just a person. An infuriating one, with dark hypnotic eyes that still made Lee uneasy for reasons he couldn’t articulate; but a person nonetheless.

“If I could have anything I wanted,” said Lee, doing the other man the courtesy of taking the question seriously, “I wouldn’t need much. A little cabin, somewhere at the edge of the world, for coming and going. Enough fuel to keep the balloon going. Honest work, no more hustling. Just me and the sky, with Hester, and Lyra, and Iorek -”

“Ah,” said Jopari, nodding. “The famous bear.”

“One of my oldest friends.”

“That would be enough for you, then,” said the other man. “You and your daemon, and a child, and a bear.”

“That would be better than enough,” said Lee. “That would be perfect happiness.”

It was silent for a long time, and he could sense, without looking at him, that the shaman was taking this in.

Then, “Do you never take lovers, Mr. Scoresby?” he asked in a low voice, and the question made both Lee and Hester go completely still.

Suddenly and keenly aware of how close they were sitting, Lee felt the abrupt need for another cup of coffee - mostly because refilling his tin mug would take him to the other side of the balloon’s cabin, putting a suddenly crucial extra few feet of space between them. “That’s by way of being rather a personal question,” he answered, a little stiffly, as he poured the steaming coffee. “Why would you ask a thing like that?”

The shaman shrugged. “Curiosity,” he offered. “To understand you better. A way to pass the time.”

“If you’re plannin’ to use your shaman powers to conjure me up a woman, I’ll say a polite no thank you,” he retorted, rising back up again and bringing the rest of the pot back to refill the other man’s mug as well. “Already close enough quarters in here as is.”

“Interesting,” said the shaman, in that maddeningly flat, all-knowing voice again, looking up at Lee as he filled his coffee cup.

“What is?”

“I said ‘lover,’” he pointed out. “I never specified ‘woman.’ Though it interests me that you did.”

Lee halted midstep, halfway back to the coffee press to return the pot, and felt his cheeks flush hot and red. Across the cabin, Hester had risen up to her hind legs with her ears perked up and her nose twitching, indicating she was just as vexed as he. “Now see here, Mr. Jopari,” he began, but did not quite know how to proceed from there, especially since he was still holding an empty coffee pot uselessly in his hands, seemingly unable to complete this extremely simple task.

The shaman regarded him with great interest. “Have I offended you?” he asked curiously. “Is that a distasteful implication, here?”

“I’m not a delicate bloom that needs coddling,” Lee said crossly. “But the Magisterium’s got ears even in the skies. Damn dangerous thing to say.”

This seemed to strike the shaman as hilariously funny. “You still have a black eye, Mr. Scoresby,” he said. “You were arrested and beaten and tortured by the Magisterium, and only very narrowly escaped with your life. You told me you were their declared enemy. How do you imagine any details of your personal life could possibly affect their opinion of you, for better or worse?”

This was an annoyingly reasonable point.

“Still,” said Lee, “I don’t -”

The shaman sailed on as though he had not even spoken. “Unless, of course,” he went on, “when you speak of The Magisterium, you mean not the men in the airships, but their ways of thinking. The way they see the world, and have taught the people in it how to behave. Were your parents loyal to the faith, perhaps? Were you young, when it shaped you?”

_What were you running from, Lee Scoresby?_

Lee set the coffee pot down, and dropped heavily onto the bench, scrubbing his hands over his face wearily. “Listen,” he said. “Not saying you’re right, not saying you’re wrong, just that . . . that’s a part of my life I don’t talk about. Doesn’t mean it’s a secret, or even that it’s all bad. It’s just . . . the past. My past. And it’s behind me.”

“That’s fair,” said the shaman, nodding, and mercifully pressed no further.

“You had something like a Magisterium in your world,” Lee remembered suddenly. “You said, before, when you were talking about the song.”

“Yes and no. That is to say, religion was not one homogenous entity, but a vast fractured and contradictory landscape. Many sects held very closely to the moral teachings of your Magisterium, and their clergy would quite probably find many friends in your world. Others were so far the opposite direction that the Magisterium would call them heretical, closer to the spiritual teachings of the witches or the shamans.”

This seemed to be a topic on which he was perfectly willing to say more, as though they’d finally reached safe ground - neutral, but of interest to both - and there were a hundred more things Lee could have asked. About his world, about his Magisterium, about what people in his world believed. 

But instead - for some incomprehensible reason - he asked something entirely different.

“What about you?”

“I was a seeker. I asked questions. I did not declare myself in possession of answers. My theology was simply the desire to learn.”

Lee felt his face flush again, and out of the corner of his eye he could see Hester watching him. “No,” he said awkwardly. “I mean -”

The shaman looked up at him, and met his eyes, suddenly human again, suddenly intensely interested, that dark gaze drawing Lee in.

“Oh,” he said quietly. “What about me, as in . . . do I ever take lovers, and are those lovers only women?” Lee swallowed hard, and couldn’t answer. “That’s by way of being rather a personal question,” said the shaman wryly. “I believe those were your words.”

“Well, you started it,” said Lee, but he was feeling too many complicated things to toss off the remark as lightly as he’d meant to. 

A kind of faraway look came over Jopari’s face, and he suddenly looked deeply human, and desperately sad. “You asked before if I had given up,” he said. “For a long, long time, I refused to. I was sure I could find another window, a way back home to my wife and my son. Now, I know better. The doors between us are closed, and I do not believe they will open again. The kindest approach, I think, would be for her to consider herself a widow, and me a widower. I would . . .” His voice cracked for a moment, suddenly, causing Sayan Kötör to swoop down from the ropes and settle on his shoulder, steadying him a little. It helped. He composed himself and resumed. “I would hope,” he went on, “that she might someday find someone else. Rather than wait forever for a husband who can never come back to her. Rather than being alone.”

“That was years ago, wasn’t it?” Hester asked the shaman, surprising them both again by addressing him directly. “And there’s been nobody since then?”

“No,” said Jopari. “But I have a daemon now, which I did not before. So I am not alone anymore, in the way that I was.”

Lee hated himself a little for his inability to repress his next question. “Before your wife,” he said hesitantly. “Were there ever . . .”

“Men,” the shaman finished for him, and nodded. “Does that shock you?”

 _“Shock” ain’t quite the word,_ Lee thought but didn’t say. He was, indeed, feeling a hundred different things, and shock might have been one of them, but it was hardly the most potent or the most unsettling.

“I don’t shock easy, Mr. Jopari,” he said flippantly, trying again for a lightness of tone that didn’t fool the other man in the least.

“You were rather shocked just now when I asked the same question of you,” the shaman pointed out.

Lee waved this off. “Took me by surprise, is all.”

“And now you seem discomfited again.”

“Will you stop doin’ that?” snapped Lee, whose accent always grew more pointed when he was annoyed.

“Doing what?”

 _“Reading_ me. Lookin’ into my head, tellin’ me my thoughts. It’s enough to drive a man batty. You just sit there quietly, smilin’ at me all serene like a damn sphinx, and then you just -”

“What?”

 _“Say_ things.”

The shaman was regarding him with frank curiosity now, and open amusement. Lee suspected he enjoyed leaving other people rattled, that he took pleasure in the effect he had on people.

“You’re very agitated, Mr. Scoresby,” he observed.

“Oh, knock it off.”

“Do people in your world never have these kinds of conversations? About their histories? About intimacy? Love? Desire?”

“I don’t know what _people_ do, Mr. Jopari,” said Lee a little defensively. “I only know me.”

“And you don’t like to talk about these things.”

“No sir, I don’t.”

“Why?”

“Gives people power over you,” said the aeronaut frankly. “And I still don’t know you that well.”

“Would it change things,” asked the shaman, “if you did?”

Lee looked up at him. Something in the air around them had changed, at this question. It was clear even the daemons felt it. There was something new inside the words Jopari was saying. Something which hadn’t been there before.

Something that felt like an invitation, though Lee did not yet know to what.

Then the extraordinary, life-shattering, incomprehensible thing happened.

The shaman held out his hand - not to Lee, not to the man sitting on the bench a few feet away and regarding him with a panicked tangle of emotions he could not begin to sort out right now; but to Hester, still curled up on the sheepskin on the bench on his other side.

And Hester - shocking herself as much as Lee - came to him.

She hopped from her own bench to the one where Jopari sat, looking up at him expectantly, before nosing gently into his outstretched hand. “That’s it,” murmured the shaman. “Good, Hester. You’re safe with me.” 

Then he reached out, and with the faintest brush of his fingertips, he caressed the hare’s thick brown fur.

The rush of sensation which flooded through Lee at the touch was _explosive,_ and he was unable to repress the soft cry which the shock of such intimacy had torn from his throat.

It was somehow magnificent and excruciating all at once, a rush of overwhelming pleasure so fierce it felt like pain. It was like being caressed all over by a hundred pairs of hands, but they were not merely on him, they were _inside_ him. Hands on his skin, in his hair, but also hands deep inside his lungs and the back of his skull and the long bones of his thighs and the sudden, pulsing heat at the place where they joined, and _oh . . ._

Never - never in all his life - 

“We don’t,” he choked out, his entire body trembling, “people don’t -”

“Touch each other’s daemons,” finished the shaman. “I know. That was why I invited her to come to me. I would never have touched her without asking first.”

“I like how it feels, Lee,” said Hester, turning to look at him, nudging again at the shaman’s hand, pleading for more.

“I do too,” Lee whispered, “Hester, I like it too, but it’s not, we can’t - it’s _wrong,_ it’s -” 

But all the air left his lungs at once as the shaman’s hands resumed stroking Hester’s fur. 

A hundred fingers turned into a thousand. On the notches of his spine and the back of his neck, behind his eyes and beneath the soles of his feet, caressing his lips and his shoulders and the pulsing red mass of the heart hammering inside his chest . . .

Lee could hardly move. A force stronger than gravity pinned him in place, slumped against the back of the bench, dizzy as a drunken man. “Please,” he managed to gasp out. “It’s so much, I can’t -”

But he didn’t say stop, so the shaman didn’t stop, caressing Hester’s thick fur as she nestled against his chest, both of them watching Lee intently.

“Tell me what it feels like,” murmured the shaman. “Where do you feel it? Is it pleasure or pain?”

“Everywhere. Both. I can’t, it’s too -”

“Let him breathe for a moment,” said Sayan Kötör, sailing back down from the ropes to alight on the outer rim of the cabin walls, behind Lee’s shoulder. “Be gentle with him.”

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Jopari drew his hand away, though Hester remained nestled in his lap. But it eased the overwhelming avalanche of sensation enough to permit the aeronaut to draw a shaky breath, returning to his body, letting the trembling of his bones and muscles subside.

“You want to know what it feels like?” he whispered hoarsely. “Do you, really?”

The shaman looked at him with those dark, serious eyes, and said nothing, as though waiting to see what Lee would do.

So Lee turned, and held out his own hand, inviting the hawk behind him to step from her perch on the railing onto his wrist.

Sayan Kötör was more skeptical than Hester had been, but curiosity won out in the end. She let her slim talons curl around the flesh of his wrist - impossibly sharp they were, lethal if she wanted them to be, but she was taking great care with him. Fixing her gleaming black eyes on the aeronaut’s, she slowly lifted one graceful gray wing to allow him access to the delicate webbing of feather and tendon. 

For a long moment, he just admired it. The miracle of flight, the way muscle and hollow bone and a dizzying array of feathers - pale fuzzy downy ones inside the wing joint, extending out to long stiff silky ones at the farthest edges, sturdy enough to take the wind - combined to make her form so aerodynamic. They regarded each other thoughtfully, one flying creature to another, before Lee finally reached out one still-shaking hand and ran a single fingertip along the entire breadth of the wing, from edge to edge.

Beside him, the shaman gave a convulsive shudder of pleasure which nearly sent Hester careening out of his lap.

“Again,” he demanded, in a voice that sent heat coursing through Lee’s body. “Right there. Just like that.”

So Lee obeyed, and did it again, stroking the osprey’s sleek gray feathers, watching the man beside him lose control over and over and over again - watching him sink back against the railing, eyes closed, breath ragged, fists clenching and unclenching, sweat beginning to bead at his temples. He could have watched this for hours, but he remembered the hawk’s gentle chiding, and finally paused, drawing his hand back and letting her lower her wing back against her body. She hopped lightly off his wrist and onto the rail again, and Jopari’s whole body collapsed against the back of the bench behind him like a rag doll. 

Hester, sensing the shaman needed a moment, stepped lightly out of his lap; but as she moved away, he brushed her ears with the back of his hand. The sensation startled a sharp, loud moan out of Lee’s throat. But before he could rise and move away, to apologize for how raw, how needy, how inappropriate the sound was, it was already too late, because John Parry had closed the inches of distance between them on the bench, and kissed him.

At first, Lee was too stunned to respond. His whole mind went completely blank, and his body still. Like his heart forgot how to beat, his lungs forgot how to breathe, his muscles forgot how to move. It had felt dangerous and decadent, touching each other’s daemons, and it was impossible to deny that it had stirred him in a way he hadn’t been stirred in a long time; but there had also been something so distant, so alien, so . . . _shamanic_ about it. It had never occurred to him that the man would really touch him. He’d never expected the line between them to be crossed so entirely.

But here he was, pressed back against the low wall of the balloon’s cabin by the force of a warm, strong body, heat surging through his veins. Perhaps as a kind of lingering aftereffect from the radical intimacy of another man’s hands touching Hester, Lee felt as though every sense in his body was heightened, somehow. The shaman’s mouth still tasted like coffee, and a faint scent of herbs and smoke seemed to rise from his clothing and skin. As though moving of their own accord, Lee’s hands rose from his sides to clutch wildly at the shaman’s jacket, bunching the fabric in his fists to yank the man closer, feeling his mouth tumble open beneath the insistent, relentless, glorious pressure of Jopari’s lips moving on his.

Lee had evaded the question, but the shaman had figured him right. He’d never been with a man, like this. Never even thought about it. He was a live-and-let-live kind of person, certainly not one to judge anyone else for who they loved, so the fact that such people existed wasn’t new to him and he didn’t think poorly of it at all, no matter what the Magisterium said. But never in his life had a man made him feel like this.

No one had ever kissed him with such ferocity. No one had ever wanted him this badly. Lee didn’t even know it could be _like_ this, between two people, and he’d had it good plenty of times before. He was no innocent maiden, after all, he’d bedded plenty of women in his life, particularly in his restless younger years; but being kissed by Jopari made him feel like it was the first time all over again, like he was sailing through the night sky without a map of the stars to guide him.

Was it _this,_ all along, that had made the air between them so charged with that kind of crackling anbaric tension? Was that why the man itched at him so, why Lee felt so unsettled by the keenness of his attention, the intensity of his focus, why it was so impossible to tear his gaze away from those piercing dark eyes?

Had it been _this,_ from the beginning, from the moment he looked up and saw the man standing at the top of the steps to his house?

Did the ring know? Did the osprey? Did Serafina? Did the wind? Did the shaman’s magic - which had called across the known world to bring Lee Scoresby to him - somehow anticipate that Fate would find him here, dizzy with unexpected pleasure as a man’s warm, hungry mouth seized his own for the very first time in his life? Was it always his destiny, to be kissed by this man in the cabin of a balloon flying through a world he didn’t even know?

The shaman broke away just then to catch his breath, resting his forehead against Lee’s. _“Fuck,”_ he groaned, sounding very much like an ordinary man and not like a shaman at all, and Lee felt a rueful grin tug at the corners of his mouth, like it was the matches all over again. 

Maybe there was no magic here, except the ordinary human kind, after all.

But that was still enough.

“You sure know how to take a man by surprise, Mr. Jopari,” Lee managed, chuckling a little breathlessly.

The shaman pulled back just a little to meet his eyes. “If we’re going to do this,” he murmured, “call me John.”

Lee swallowed hard. “Are we?” he asked hesitantly. “Going to . . . do this?”

John’s hands glided up the faded leather of Lee’s jacket, from his arms to his shoulders, from his shoulders to his throat, from his throat to his jaw, cradling the man’s face in his gentle fingers, caressing the soft scruff of his beard, and kissed him again, hot and swift and fierce, tongue sweeping roughly into Lee’s open mouth, making him shudder.

“There are some things, I think,” John said carefully as he pulled away, and Lee could see even in the dim lamplight that there was a faint flush on the shaman’s cheeks, “which require more time. And preparation. And space. And a real fucking bed.” Lee chuckled, a little ruefully, at this, conceding the point. “But there are other things,” John went on in a quiet voice, “which can be managed perfectly well in the space we have.” He pressed a soft kiss against the aeronaut’s mouth. “If you want to.”

“I do,” said Lee immediately, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he could even form the thought.

“You sure?”

“Can I be sure, and still frightened?” murmured the aeronaut. “Cause this is all new territory for me.”

“Between the two of us,” said the shaman, “we’ve done pretty well so far navigating unfamiliar stars.”

“Only because you’ve been here before.”

“Not for a long, long time.”

“But at least you know where you’re going.”

“You’re a smart man, Lee. It won’t take you long to learn your way around.”

“We still talkin’ about flyin’, or the other thing?”

John laughed at this, and kissed him again, and Lee found himself wishing they’d figured all of this out days ago, in that little wooden house in the clearing, which at least did have a real bed, because then he wouldn’t have lost so much precious time when he could have been kissing this man and wasn’t.

When they pulled apart this time, John looked over at the bench on the other side of him, where Sayan Kötör had made her graceful way around the railing to meet Hester, and was now perched beside her, enfolding the hare in the embrace of her sleek gray wings. “Let’s give them some privacy,” he murmured, rising to his feet and taking Lee by the hand, moving to the padded bench on the other side of the cabin, the broad column of pipes and dials and ropes creating at least the illusion of distance between the embracing daemons and themselves.

Lee watched helplessly as John removed the heavy denim overjacket he wore, folded it carefully, and set it on the bench, followed by the second, lighter jacket he wore beneath it, followed by the thick flannel shirt below that, leaving only a faded gray undershirt - so thin and threadbare the muscles of his torso were perceptible through it - which he shed last. Then he stepped carefully out of his boots, tucked his socks into them, and slid them beneath the bench, out of the way.

When his hands moved to the zipper of his jeans, Lee couldn’t watch, lowering his eyes to the floor out of some combination of misplaced modesty, shyness, desire, and fear. He did not look up until the jeans had been folded on top of the coats, and John Parry stood before him in nothing but a pair of cotton shorts, watching and waiting to see what Lee would do.

For a long time, Lee just took him in. The tattoos on his hands wound most of the way up his arms and shoulders, a library of peculiar shapes and symbols Lee couldn’t read. His torso bore the bruises and scars of hard living; he’d fought, more than once, though perhaps not for some time. It was the body of a man who had lived a complicated life, and Lee was torn between the desire to trace his fingers over every scar and ask John for its story, and the desire to feel all that skin pressed against his own.

“Do you sleep in all your clothes, when you fly at night?” John asked, pulling Lee back to himself and reminding him that while the other man was nearly naked, he was still fully clothed.

“Usually,” he said. “Not a lot of room in here for dressing and undressing. And up north, nights get cold.”

“It isn’t cold now,” said John gently, which was true. It was a balmy, breezy night, and the thought of feeling fresh air on his skin was irresistible to Lee, his flying leathers suddenly constricting. He’d shed his long coat some time ago, stashed in its usual place beneath the pilot’s seat; now he stood still, as though hypnotized, and let the other man carefully unfasten the buttons of his leather jacket, the vest beneath it, his artillery belt and holster, and finally the faded button-down shirt which was the last layer between the night air and the bared skin of his scarred, muscled chest. He let John fold his jacket and shirt, placing them beside his own, while he stepped out of his tall boots and socks, and then slowly, hesitantly, removed his leather trousers, leaving himself clad only in a pair of threadbare shorts.

When John turned back around, he swallowed hard, raking his eyes hungrily over the other man’s nearly naked body. “You’re beautiful, Lee Scoresby,” he murmured in a low voice, causing the aeronaut to flush uncomfortably and stare down at the wood planks of the floor, shuffling his feet. 

“Kind of you to say,” he muttered, “but I’m not as young as I used to be, and I -”

But he couldn’t finish the sentence, because John’s mouth was on his again, even more urgent and hungry than before. The feel of another man’s skin against his own was intoxicating, and when John pulled the sheepskin from the bench onto the floor of the balloon and gently guided Lee onto his back on top of it, Lee trembled, but did not resist.

“My God, you terrify me,” the shaman murmured unexpectedly, pressing a line of hot, rough kisses against the taut slope of the aeronaut’s shoulders and throat, tongue sweeping across scarred, golden skin.

“Me?” he said incredulously. “When you’re the one out here summoning storms and wind? How the hell did _I_ become the frightening one?”

“Because I can see what happens when you look at me,” John murmured. “I asked you before, what would be perfect happiness for you. And all you wanted was a cabin and a balloon, your bear friend and your little girl. A simple life. An honest life. But I can feel you rewriting that picture, Lee,” he went on, brushing his lips over the man’s ear and cheek and jaw. “You’ve already put me in it. And it scares the _fuck_ out of me how much I find myself wanting that too.” He lowered his head, then, resting his forehead against Lee’s shoulder, and Lee wrapped his arms around the other man’s scarred back, holding him close.

“Your son might find a window someday,” he murmured. “Maybe he got your explorer blood after all. You don’t know. Might be he finds his way to our world, finds his way to you. And then you could, we could . . .”

He trailed off, but the picture was clear in both their minds. A cozy cottage, at the edge of the world, far enough south that they wouldn’t freeze to death at nights but far enough north that Iorek could visit from time to time. Just Will and Lyra, Hester and Sayan Kötör, and John and Lee. 

They could be a family.

“When all of this is over,” John murmured, kissing Lee’s shoulder.

Lee nodded. “When all of this is over.”

The shaman lifted his head and looked down at him, his dark eyes bright with tears, and it made something deep inside Lee’s chest crack wide open. It could not be love, that was hardly possible, people didn’t fall in love this quickly except in stories, and Lee Scoresby was nobody’s romantic hero. But it felt enough like love to make Lee desperate to lift the heavy weight of sadness off the other man’s shoulders. So he reached up to tug at the shaman’s hair, guiding his mouth back down, and kissed him as hard as he could.

It worked. The tension in John’s body softened immediately, and Lee felt the other man’s weight settle comfortably against his own, body to body, bare skin to bare skin under the warm starry sky and the night breeze. For a long time, they just lay like that, hands exploring each other, no sounds to be heard except soft kisses and quiet muffled sighs. But that crackling anbaric current running between them grew hotter and hotter, leaving the very air around them feeling charged and alive, and when the next line between them was crossed, it was Lee - surprising even himself - who crossed it first.

His hands, tangled in the shaman’s thick black hair, glided down his shoulders to his back, tripping lightly over the notches of his spine until he reached the waistband of the cotton shorts. He paused there for a moment, heart pounding, before gently taking the fabric in both hands and tugging it down.

John froze on top of him, tearing his mouth away from kissing Lee and pulling back enough to look down at him. “Are you sure?” he murmured.

“I’m sure.”

“Still frightened?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

“Unfamiliar skies,” said John, with a fraction of a smile.

Lee smiled back up at him, lifting one hand to trace the shape of the man’s lower lip. “Not so unfamiliar, now,” he said. “I’ve been drawing a map.”

John looked at him in silence for a long, long time. “You don’t know what I would give,” he said quietly, “to have a heart as open as yours, Lee Scoresby.” He leaned down and kissed him again. “I can’t believe it took me so long to understand it. Who you are, who Hester is. I can’t believe I didn’t see it from the moment I heard the way you talked about that little girl.” He pressed his hand against the bare skin of Lee’s chest, feeling the heart hammering away beneath his palm. “You love so deeply that it hurts,” the shaman murmured. “So you tried all your life not to. You tried to live lightly on the world. To fly free without a tether. And then you met the child, and you loved her, and you hated Asriel. Because he had the thing you wanted - a family, a daughter - and he squandered it.” He leaned down and kissed Lee’s mouth. “And now the floodgates are open,” he murmured. “Your heart isn’t locked away anymore. You want to be a different man, for her. You want to build a different kind of life, for her. You want to be a husband and a father. You want to put down roots.”

“Why are we talking about Lyra and Asriel?”

“Because I think you love me too,” said John. “And that’s why you’re building a picture in your mind of a life with me in it. Of a home with me in it. And I think I could - once this is all over, once the war ends, if we live through to the other side of this, Lee, I think I could . . . I could love you in that life too.” He brushed his fingertips over Lee’s cheekbone, gazing down at the aeronaut with something like awe and wonder. “It isn’t just desire,” he said. “You must have realized that. You must feel it too. We’ve both had that. That isn’t what this is.”

“No,” Lee whispered, breathing hard. “That isn’t what this is.”

John shifted his weight to tug the shorts all the way off his hips, tossing them to the side before tentatively removing Lee’s as well, leaving them both bared to each other, and trembling at the feeling of it. John was hard already; Lee could feel the weight and heat and pressure of it against his own thigh, and he knew he himself was not far behind. But he was unprepared for the shock of pleasure when the shaman reached down between their bodies and took that aching, pulsing weight in his gentle hands.

Lee gasped, and shuddered, hips lifting off the sheepskin beneath his body, and felt his thighs fall open to make room for John to settle between them, deft fingers working up and down to draw a hundred different competing sensations from Lee’s body.

Someone else doing this to you, Lee reflected, as waves of pleasure rolled through him, was not a bit like doing it to yourself. Not just that the angle was different, or that the shaman’s callused, tattooed hands were alive with such power; but the way it felt to be _surprised_ by touch, to be startled into gasping by the feel of a caress somewhere he didn’t expect it. He wanted to return the pleasure, to watch John, too, gasp with surprise at an unexpected touch; but he’d never done this to anyone else. This was an act usually done in private, back turned discreetly, while Hester averted her eyes or occupied herself with something else until it was finished.

But John had looked him in the eye and called Lee Scoresby by name, laid bare his whole life - past, present, and a future so sweet Lee hardly dared hope for it - and it wasn’t because he was a shaman. It was because they’d _seen_ each other.

“You’re right,” he murmured, reaching down hesitantly to take John’s length in his hands. “I think I do love you. Ain’t that a hell of a thing.” John shivered at the touch, and his head dropped forward to rest against Lee’s shoulder, back rising and falling, deep heaving breaths tumbling out of him. “When the war’s over,” he murmured. “Everything you said. I do want that. I do want that with you. I’d come down from the skies, John Parry, if you asked me to.”

“I would never ask you to,” the shaman breathed raggedly, kissing his way up Lee’s throat until their mouths collided again, and that was the last thing anyone said for a long, long time. 

When the heat and pressure building up between Lee’s thighs began to swell to such a crescendo that he could hardly breathe, John lifted his head to gaze down at him. “I’d like to watch you,” he murmured, almost apologetically, caressing Lee’s cheek with one hand as the other worked deftly to guide Lee to the edge of the cliff. 

John had a hundred different ways to touch him, places no one had ever touched Lee, places Lee had never touched himself, and thus had no idea how desperately sensitive they were. For his part, Lee’s touches were less dextrous, more fumbling, at least at first; but he was, as he’d teased John playfully, pretty good at drawing maps. And he’d begun to map John Parry from the moment he’d first laid eyes on the man’s bare skin. He was already learning to identify the tattoos by feel; the texture was rougher, and raised just the tiniest bit from the flesh surrounding it. John’s collarbone and neck were sensitive to touch, and he shuddered when Lee kissed him there. He had a scar between his shoulderblades, just at the top of his spine, long-faded, just a raised line, which Lee suspected had come from a knife, a thought which raised a kind of ferocious protectiveness in Lee’s heart. He wanted to go back in time and hunt down everyone who had put a scar on this body.

And as he’d begun to map the rest of John’s body, he’d mapped this most sensitive part of it too. He’d learned as he went, from listening to the sounds the other man made, where he liked to be touched, and how to tell if he was close . . . which right now, he very clearly was.

“I do love you,” said Lee, and no more words were necessary after that, as their hands moved in tandem, sensation coursing through their bodies like a river beginning to flood, and when they finally both tumbled over the edge - John first, Lee following - their voices merged together into one low, desperate, tangled cry.

Spent, John’s weight collapsed on Lee’s chest, and their arms wrapped around each other, letting their heated flesh cool, letting their bodies return to earth, letting their desperate, ragged breathing ease.

"When all of this is over," Lee finally said, pressing a kiss into the shaman's dark hair, and felt him nod, though he did not look up.

"When all of this is over," John agreed, as solemn as a vow, and that was the last thing either of them said before the cool night breeze eased them gently into sleep.


End file.
